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Confronted by a patient with Alzheimer’s, physicians may prescribe currently available drugs that may allay symptoms like memory loss a bit, for a while. Few perform the simple cognitive tests to assess the patient’s cognitive function and stage of the illness. Assessment of the patient, and education and counseling of the caregiver, is time consuming, and doctors aren’t paid much to spend a lot of time with patients. Unfortunately, the lack of proper assessment and advanced care planning often dooms the patient and their family to a gauntlet of potentially preventable crises, from bathtub falls to malnutrition, costly (to the individual and the taxpayer) and avoidable hospitalizations, and disappearances like B.’s which could have ended in disaster.

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